When you start out in the world of the Internet, you will come across different kinds of money-making opportunities and programs. While many promise to make you rich overnight, only very few are genuine opportunities that would lead you to your heartsí desire but certainly not overnight or as fast as you would want.

It takes hard and smart work, patience, perseverance and an investment at times, no matter how little, to earn a living on the internet. There are different income opportunities on the internet: Network Marketing or Multi-Level Marketing or MLM for short as well as Affiliate Programs. This article throws more light on the latter income opportunity.

As the name implies, an affiliate program is one in which one gets to earn commissions for marketing and successfully selling a companyís or individualís products over the internet. You are in a kind of partnership with the person and you get to earn commissions on every successful sale.

The way it works is that you join an affiliate program by signing up on a form through a sponsorís website and the beauty of the program is that you are given an exact same site like the one through which you signed up when you joined the program.

The difference between your site and your sponsorís is that you are given an identification or ID that is unique to you just as your sponsor is also given, as well as others in the program. This ID is incorporated in the web address or URL to which visitors who click on are taken and who are interested in either buying a product or joining under you as a sub-affiliate.

It is this ID tied to your website in the program that is used to track sales and commissions due to you.

Some affiliate programs pay you commissions ranging from about 10% to as high as 75% of product price for your direct sales and commissions also on the sales made by your sub-affiliates. Some of the programs are free to join and only require your marketing the products to earn a commission on every sale while some require you to pay a monthly recurring fee while you market to earn good commissions.

Very few programs pay you a monthly commission when you pay a monthly recurring fee, as well as other commissions when you recruit sub-affiliates that also pay the monthly recurring fee. This can be a good source of income that adds up as your downline of sub-affiliates grow from month to month.

Unfortunately, affiliate programs have two flaws that one must watch our for. The first and more important is that some fraudsters could join through your affiliate website and when they want to make a purchase, replace your ID with theirs and thereby deprive you of your due commission.

Fortunately, there are some affiliate programs that have found a way around this flaw by providing you with a hidden URL with affiliate ID that is difficult to crack by the fraudsters. A second flaw is that some affiliate programs are operated by fraudsters who will just milk you of your hard earned cash by charging you a sign up fee or even a monthly recurring fee and you will continue to wait and wait and nothing ever happens except that you lose your hard earned cash.

Even with these flaws, affiliate programs are a nice way to earn good income on the internet. As a starter, what you can do is to join the free ones first and then take time to study how the whole thing works.

I assure you that with a little patience, perseverance and willingness to learn, you will begin to identify legitimate affiliate programs that require a fee and you will learn the ropes about marketing them to earn good cash over time to allow you begin to live a life of your dreams.